Don't Worry About the Weather

Two large hurricanes have struck the United States in recent months producing large-scale evacuations, casualties and property damage. It should not surprise readers of Lew Rockwell that these events result inevitably in calls for significant intervention from the authorities: local, state and federal. Much of this will be demands for the government to do something, as always, at the taxpayer’s expense to prevent, indemnify and recover from these catastrophes. There will be many vociferous demands from the "experts" to finally do something about global warming, the certain causative agent (in their opinion). All of this is specious climate noise.

The climatological record of useful accuracy only goes back 100 to 150 years. Prior to that time, the data is spotty from inaccurate and imprecise sources. That is, it is useless as a predictive tool.

The earth is some 4.5 billion years old according to established and accepted scientific doctrine (by most). For this analysis, we’ll neglect errors due to small variations in the earth’s rotation rate, leap years and calendar corrections by various Papal authorities. There are 54,750 days in 150 years, 365,000,000 in a million years, and finally 1,642,500,000,000 (this is a little more than 1.6 trillion days, or 1642 billion) in 4.5 billion. It should be obvious that the "weather record" is statistically insignificant and should not be used in making predictions. The sampling period is too short.

The daily weather report is fascinating, replete with beautiful graphics, and videos of natures’ splendor. It approximately tells me what is going to happen tomorrow: rain, snow or sunshine. It’s a useful tool. Do I wear shorts, a coat, hat and gloves? It does not tell one what to do for long-term planning, like investments, congressional spending, or if they should finally build that beach condo in hurricane alley.

The weather report is full of records as well. Listeners are regaled with tales of all time record highs, lows, and rainfall, drought, strength and frequency of hurricanes. Given the statistical insignificance of the sampling period of these records (54,750/1,642,500,000,000, which is a small number and thus statistically improbable) the prudent observer should pay them no mind as these are not records at all, but bad conjectures from incompetent statisticians (math skills like these will not pass the actuarial exam, which is the industry standard for statistical competence that many companies rely upon).

The weather is a complex dynamical system that mankind does not have the capability to model accurately or make meaningful predictions from. I’ll give a brief postscript as to why, so the mathematically disinterested can finish the article without this tedious diversion.

For arguments sake let’s say that the Almighty handed me an Excel spreadsheet of the daily variance in high temperature for my home town, on a single given day like New Years Eve, scaled from 0 to 1 for ease of reading, for the last thousand years. Temperatures at 0.5 are "average" those below colder those above hotter. It might look like the following chart:

Zoom in on say the last 150 years and it would like:

What does this mean? As weather observers we travel along this chart from the left to right (moving from 150 years ago to the present day). The peaks and the valleys represent lots of "all time" daily highs and lows in temperature as we move through this sampling period. This is much like the weather viewing the past from the perspective of today. However, this is meaningless when the data set is looked at in total. It’s random noise in the signal.

Now the Almighty did not provide this data, it was downloaded from an atmospheric turbulence monitor that is used for generating random numbers of very good statistical fidelity with respect to entropy (degree of randomness).

The point here is that an invalid statistical sampling interval cannot be used for deriving conclusions because it introduces bias. It is easy, as has been shown, to make good-looking data sets that are meaningless, much like many other "official," and useless statistical charts (aka chartjunk).

The weather is behaving exactly as it should. All time records are not records at all, just invalid conclusions drawn from poor samples. The danger is that scores of climatologists, ecologists, bureaucrats, socialists, policy wonks and lunatics want to use this kind of data to dramatically alter societal behavior. They are certain that global warming is an imminent danger and that drastic policy proscriptions are justified so these zealots can save mankind from demise. 

Unemployed Al Gore (aka politician not currently in office) is stumping shamelessly and vociferously with the media trumpets blaring and the talking heads spouting about his commitment and "expertise" in conjunction with his "documentary." Lots of shrill pontification about ice cores and tree rings, yet not a lot of actual data. Undeterred "experts" provide a great deal of extrapolation, which as all statisticians know, is dangerous territory. Al Gore is at his best here: finding the dependent variable from a blizzard of independent variables. This is mendacity in the extreme since he has not, to my knowledge, ever been employed or trained as an applied mathematician, an atmospheric physicist or a statistician.

These zealots need to be treated as ignorant and dangerous. Ignorant, that is lacking knowledge, because they do not understand these complex dynamical systems, since no human beings currently can. Dangerous in that they want to use the coercive power of the state to immediately bend public behavior to their will. They have no hope of controlling nature, so they will settle for controlling others, namely you and I.

This is just a bunch of climate-induced noise designed for statist solutions to have another excuse to wreak havoc on the public fisc. The legitimization of such noise occurs when it is presented in a visually appealing and intriguing format via the mass media which makes it an easy sell to an uninformed populace. Unlike my random data, this noise provides full employment, and state-backed empowerment for new legions of bureaucrats, laws, regulations and taxes with a concomitant reduction in the hard-earned capital available. That’s real peril!

P.S. The "weather" is a dynamic interaction between gravity, the rotation of the earth, solar dynamics, thermodynamics, chemical kinetics and fluid flow which is governed by the Navier-Stokes equation. All of this is a non-linear system of partial differential equations that cannot be solved or even approximated with current technology to any useful accuracy. Any purported solution of this system is so infected with simplifications to make the equations tractable, such that it perturbs the system sufficiently so that it no longer represents what it is modeling, and thus is, is invalid and wrong.

A one million dollar prize is available for a proof relating to the Navier Stokes equation should any readers be inclined to remediate this situation with their genius.